Some Field Observations
July 2026
It’s been a hot minute. By which I mean, how do we describe time’s passing? By which I mean, what are days but small fruits to be eaten up with yoghurt at breakfast.
Of course our patterns cannot always stay the same.
Elsewhere as physical state. As mental state. As location. As non-location.
When the generalised anxiety became too much to bear I gripped the wooden sides of my small boat and crooned to the night sky, fortunately on this occasion the birds answered, bringing small drops of solace and relief which fell from their wingtips as they passed above.
Driving from Manchester to Leicester all the grass in all the fields I pass is dead and brown. Are you not terrified? Do you not wake in the night dripping with dread? Does your heart not burn with grief?
When I saw my friend who I had not seen for many months I was reminded how everything is and isn’t. In the shape of his face I saw was, is, and will be. All our shared memories were in a jar of honey I held in my hands; I considered dipping my fingertip into it but the lid was screwed tightly on.
I always see the same girl in the mirror. Even when I squint, or peer surreptitiously from the corner of my eye. Even when I try my hardest to be quick, unexpected, to catch her off guard, she is there waiting for me with the same hair and nose and eyes and cheeks and chin always so familiar and always so deeply surprising.
At the open mic I held my contributor copy in my hand, read my own words and felt something with no name. Perhaps at that moment some of my atoms had chosen to switch places, or some of my cells ate up some of their neighbours. Perhaps the bird migrating endlessly through my body paused for a short while to wait out a bad weather front, or to enjoy a dappled morning.
When a friend and I watched an old sitcom we noticed that all the adverts her subscription brought us were hyper-feminine. We considered the pink clothes, perfect hair, and pristine razors like historians. Once, I thought there was only one world. Then, I learnt there are many. Now, I am reminded world is subjective.
The more I think about the nature of poetry competitions the more I am convinced of their randomness. When I googled truly random AI offered me radioactive decay and quantum mechanics, followed by pseudo-randomness, classical mechanics, and the philosophy of determinism. When my foot went numb I stood up and walked randomly this way and that about the living room until feeling returned in a thousand small pains.
While trying to title a poem I write so many possible yet unsuitable titles that they outnumber the lines of the poem. Often, I count the things I am doing. Often, I count the lines of my poems. Often, I count the shades of my grief, but I know so few numbers the same ones loop around and around.
Almost everyone I encounter in bird hides is interested in birds. Only one woman sits removed while her partner leans the voluptuous lens of his camera against the sill of the open window. Eyes to a screen, portal to elsewhere. Look up, I want to say, look at all the perfectly ordinary birds doing perfectly ordinary bird things and notice how astounding that is.
One day I became a taxidermy representation of myself, stuffed with a million million infectious particles each wrapped in their own little protein coat and very much enjoying the weather, thank you for asking. When I forced my voice through the thick of my throat it was small and distant, I had to listen very carefully in case I missed anything I had to say.
On the bus, in the street, moving through shop doorways, opening vehicles, posting letters into mailboxes, visiting libraries, sitting in parks, staring at maps, not looking where they’re going… all these lives like night skies full of constellations. How often do you think about it?
I thought, I just want to be happy. But there was nothing making me unhappy, nothing but the plants pushing their tangled vines through the thicket in my skull.
When I order a lime soda at the bar I wonder about the outcome. Few drinks offer this level of possibility. Everything from the glass to the price to the nature of the lime hangs in the balance. For several long minutes anything could happen. For several long minutes I am uncertain whether I am a person or a weather front. For several long minutes the bar tender thinks several things I will never know.
In the nature reserve I consider the nature of reserves. The nature that is us partitioning off the nature that is not us to save it from the nature that is us. The sun on the water is too bright to look at directly. The lakes are so low the waterbirds can barely be seen from the hides.
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